Stegosaurus | Playing Chess with Pigeons

Just wanted to share a couple fun Christmas presents I got this year and a couple of gifts I got earlier in the year that I have been meaning to post some pictures of but had not yet got round to doing so.

The first is an amusing caricature of yours truly, drawn by Gabriel Corral (who was, until recently, one of my co-workers):

A caricature of me riding a sauropod while waiving a Darwin-fish flag. The caption reads: "Not scientifically accurate".

A caricature of me riding a sauropod while waiving a Darwin-fish pennant. The caption reads: “Not scientifically accurate”.

He drew caricatures of each of us who work, or worked, at AFS Printing as Christmas gifts.

Next is a painting by my sister, Kindra Pizarro, of a skeleton tree:

An original painting by my sister Kindra.

Very cool (be sure to check out her Etsy store: Voodoo Kitty Handmade Oddities).

Finally a couple of neat dinosaur statuettes given to me by my friends Don and Gaynell Frack, I think for my last birthday (or maybe even last Christmas, can’t recall):

A Stegosaurus statuette.

A Triceratops statuette.

Apparently they bought them, for a very reasonable price, at an art sale put on by a Buddhist temple. Both are very cool, though I think I like the Triceratops best. The only problem is my ever finding a place to display them where the cats won’t be able to destroy them (first world problems).

So that’s it for now, thank you so much Gabriel, Kindra, Don and Gaynell for the thought and the gifts!

I finally had a chance this weekend to pick through some of my mother’s family photo collection and found a few pictures of myself that are prophetic about what my lifelong interests would be. They are from one of the family camping trips we took, traveling all over the American Southwest. During this trip, circa 1975, we went to Dinosaur National Monument in Utah/Colorado.

First is a picture of me (10 years old) with the famous Stegosaurus statue that greets visitors outside the Quarry Exhibit Hall. You can tell by the look on my face that I was having a terrible time.

Now admittedly the color they had originally painted this statue (a brownish green scheme) was a little dull, though we have no way of knowing what color Stegosaurus actually was. But the current paint job on the statue seems a little bizarre to me.

And here we have a shot of me inside the Quarry Exhibit Hall, being much more serious in the presence of the astonishing number of dinosaur fossils exposed in the Carnegie Dinosaur Quarry.